Category Archives: Guest Posts

As we head deeper into the holiday season, parents and others with youngsters on their shopping lists are challenged to find the best toys of the year. Retail giants have compiled their lists, including the “Hot Toy” list for the 2013 Holiday Season from Toys R Us and the “Best Toys of the Season” from Barnes and Noble. Unsurprisingly, tech and electronic toys dominate the wish lists of many kids we know. About two-thirds of the toys on the Toys…

A new study, called A-GAMES (Analyzing Games for Assessment in Math, ELA/Social Studies, and Science) has been funded by the Gates Foundation to study how video games support teachers’ classroom formative assessment practice. If you are a K-12 teacher, you can help shape and inform the research by completing a survey.   There is growing support for the use of digital video games as part of K-12 teachers’ classroom routines. As with all educational technologies, the most frequently asked question…

The London Educational Games Meetup group (or LEGup, as it’s become known), was started just over two years ago by Kirsten Campbell Howes, an educational specialist and game designer. At first, it was a small gathering in a room above a pub, where a few like-minded games makers and enthusiasts would show what they were working on, ask for feedback, and share their experiences. Two years later, LEGup has nearly 800 members (including games developers, teachers, investors and others), has…

This post was originally published on the Fred Rogers Center Blog and appears here with permission. This week my colleagues at Education Development Center and SRI International and I are releasing findings from our Prekindergarten Transmedia Mathematics Study. This research is part of Ready to Learn, a partnership between the US Department of Education, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and PBS. The basic premise of Ready to Learn is that it marshals public media resources in support of 2- to…

Play-I is developing Bo and Yana, robots that teach kids five and older some of the the basic concepts behind programming. Using a visual programming interface that weaves  music, stories, and animation, children are encouraged to think strategically with if-then statements that guide the robots along.  The robots are expected to ship in summer 2014. In this guest post, Play-I CEO Vikas Gupta explains how even the youngest kids can learn to program through playful exploration.   You’re given a…

Since the beginning of Toca Boca, we’ve always tried to invent new ways of playing with screens. Some come very naturally—like creative play—where the touchscreen device gives kids super powers for their creations. Other areas are a little more abstract and take some more thinking. In this more challenging category, we have Toca Builders, which addresses construction play. How can we use a flat 2D touchscreen to help kids create and play with models and patterns? From an adult’s perspective,…

Children are constantly experimenting. It’s ingrained in everything they do, and it’s how they learn. The process is full of humorous misunderstandings, setbacks, and successes that all lead toward mastery. And while it’s impossible to fully anticipate how children will react to something new, they can provide plenty of clues along the way. Which is exactly why playtesting our products is so important.

In recent years, augmented reality (AR) toys have gained increasing prominence at the International Toy Fair held in New York. Many of the industry’s biggest players have launched AR lines: Mattel’s Apptivity products build upon the strength of existing brands such as Batman and Hot Wheels; Hasbro’s Lazer Tag works with a compatible app to insert digital targets into the user’s environment; and the toys in Disney’s DreamPlay line, launching in the U.S. this fall, will enable kids to play…

Back in 2010, Motion Math was a finalist in the first Cooney Center Prizes for Mobile Learning. They’ve continued to make some amazing apps since then, including Motion Math Zoom, Motion Math: Hungry Fish, and more.  CEO and co-founder Jacob Klein shares some of the inspiration behind the creation of their latest app, Questimate!, a game that makes estimation fun. Our new estimation game Questimate! came out a couple weeks ago. It’s the first game where players make their own…

Girls should play more video games. That’s one of the unexpected lessons I take away from a rash of recent studies on the importance of—and the malleability of—spatial skills. First, why spatial skills matter: The ability to mentally manipulate shapes and otherwise understand how the three-dimensional world works turns out to be an important predictor of creative and scholarly achievements, according to research published this month in the journal Psychological Science. The long-term study found that 13-year-olds’ scores on traditional…